obediences | for numberthree.

She can't stop staring at their hands, at the meticulous carefulness of Luther's fingers, so deftly trained to his miniature toy models. Both are equally as breakable as the other. Everything is fragile in Number One's hands. Which makes the carefulness, the gentle stillness with which he holds her hand, something she can't ignore. Or unsee.

Allison, like everyone else in the house, knows all the small things Luther has broken along the way to this vaunted control. One greater than any of theirs. They all lost things to his exuberance or unintentional thoughtlessness when they were all so much younger. When his strength was just as great, but his control was almost non-existent. Before all the training. Before the point of all the toys, she supposed he wasn't supposed to fall enraptured with but did anyway. Until he could demolish walls of steel without trying, but still not leave finger grooves on forks and pencils.

Which makes the whole moment queer, like a trainwreck, a freeze-frame. Her handheld within the bubble of both of these. The awareness of how little pressure he'd need to exert to break every one of the bones in her hand with only the hand beneath hers. The concurrent awareness of the reverent, ever-aware, gentleness of how he was holding it. Like it was gossamer. These hands that saw just as much blood on those knuckles and under those fingernails as his.

It's a vertigo she can't escape, an impossible yearning ache in her chest.
Proud. Aware. Wanting. But when had the Rumor ever stopped wanting.
Having the ability to grant yourself everything you want.

(Everything but ... whatever this was.
She wants this without name or clarity or idea.

Wants him to keep touching her so calmly, easily.
Just her. Alone. Special. Over that line.
Wants to be wanted back.)

Her voice is a little too thick, semi-rusty, sticking to the insides of her throat when she retorts, even as she makes a face at him. "Except that you, then, leave all yours on shelves in here, just to grow dust, never changing, and I get to carry mine wherever I go, changing them whenever I feel like it."

Edited 2021-12-23 20:03 (UTC)

"A mess? You?" Luther echoes, and there's some real incredulity in his voice. Some of their family members had been far more chaotic in their interior design, and Space and Rumor's bedrooms could get somewhat cluttered, but it had always been relatively clean and orderly. They'd tidied up after themselves. (Good children put their toys away, and good soldiers put their weapons away.) And if they ever forgot to clear up on rare occasion, then Mom was inevitably there on her restless daily rounds, puttering around and folding their clothes and making their beds. The mansion was orderly because they had no alternative but to be.

"I promise not to judge," he adds a moment later although, yes, that had sounded very much like judging.

The next question is inevitable, too, as he picks his way through learning more about her. This little snapshot of a life that he hadn't had any firsthand glimpses into before, only what drips and drabs of information had bled into her letters. "And so what's Bea like? You must like her enough, if you're still living together while everyone else comes and goes."

"I—" But then Luther stops, his head cocked like a curious dog, the brush going motionless in mid-movement. "Huh. Okay. You're right on that front."

He was going to run out of space eventually, the more he kept piling on more of those models and figurines scattered all over his shelves. He hadn't really thought about what he'd do when that happened, if he'd have to start surreptitiously moving them to other rooms if allowed or throwing them out completely. Some of his collecting instinct was likely just walking in the Monocle's footsteps: the older man gathered curios like he was operating a Victorian cabinet of curiosities, trophy cabinets holding dinosaur skulls and Olympic medals and Umbrella Academy merchandise and mementos from fallen enemies alike. Animal heads mounted on walls. You couldn't peek through the doorway of the man's study without catching a glimpse of endless proofs of his own capabilities and his scientific interests. Luther was the same.

"They'll probably change a bit when I run out of room, though," he says, as he starts painting again. "I'll have to rotate them out, add in new kits."

It was still so much stasis: the same hobbies, the same type of lifeless models, a life frozen in miniature.

Allison can't stop herself from eying him at the laugh and then the promise that followed quickly on its heels. It's pricklingly close to an unspoken commentary on the fact she'd never been messy, even for everything she'd been allowed to put in her room and on her walls over the years. Only Klaus had decided to ignore those rules the older they got.

It wasn't a disaster, perhaps, the way anyone else might consider a place to be. She just wouldn't have left things across the apartment if she knew she'd be bringing Luther to see it only hours later. Which she couldn't have. She thought she'd be sleeping. She thought she'd be in another country.

(She never thought this would happen even if the world were going to end.)

Thankfully, Luther goes on talking toward her, giving her more reason to consider something other than that. Because. She's not sure she'd call herself and Bea friends. They were friendly, and Bea would likely call her a friend. It was complicated. Convenient. Allison probably used her powers more than she should, but what was new?

"She's nice." Allison tries to think. Racking her brain for sentences that yesterday, to anyone else, would have been so easy. They've lived together for over a year. But most of the trite things feel precisely that on her tongue, as she considers saying them to Luther of all people. Trite. But it's what she has. "Working some coffee shop role in a movie right now." Beat. "She basically owns a whole closet of just magazines and shoes."

There's always a delicious pride to these moments.
The ones where she contradicts something Luther says,
and he pauses, before deciding she's right.

The ones that are nothing like all of them together in a pack, during school, or practice, or a fight. Where Number One's word is law, and there is no countermanding his orders, takes, decisions, breakdown. It's heady even for something so superfluous. A tick in the marks that make her right. That she's to keep him on his toes.

"What are you going to do with them, then?" Allison looks around at the shelves and desk.
"Convince Dad you should get a larger room somewhere else? Or a secondary room to store them in?"

Some part of her already thinking that if their Dad didn't just say to trash them, she'd be surprised.

"That fits, though, right? You always liked magazines. And magazines with shoes." He doesn't sound disparaging; it's just another thing about her that he'd found charming. The magazines had been regular little glimpses of the outside world dropped into their mailbox, her window into fashion and society, while Luther glued himself to the newspaper and articles about the latest spaceflights and aeronautics. Whenever another teen mag showed up with his face or Diego's plastered on the cover, he'd wrinkled his nose; only cared about it insofar as Number One got quoted in the interview more than Number Two did. And the shoes—

Had always been the same pairs of sensible patent leather shoes, the girls' practically indistinguishable from the boys', an unchanging uniform even as they all grew older. No such thing as Casual Fridays at the Academy: Allison could accessorise and drape a colourful scarf over her shoulders when she was in her rooms, and Luther could shuck his blazer, but the bones stayed the same.

"Are you a clothes horse now? I always figured you would be." Allison looked lovely in all the photos he'd happened to see of her after she left. (She always looked lovely.)

"He has so many studies and parlours and trophy rooms. I'd hope he could spare just one trophy room someday for Number One."

It's one of the few, rare glimmers of Luther hoping for more than he has, and he still sounds too naïve about the prospect. Overly-optimistic. There's no way in hell the Monocle's carving out more space in the mansion even for his favourite, and on some level Luther knows it, although he doesn't want to look at that truth head-on. He keeps looking at Allison's delicate hands instead: the even coats of lacquer, the blood and scabs neatly wiped out of existence from their last fight. In contrast, there's still a band-aid on one of his knuckles.

"Did you ever wonder why we didn't get bigger rooms?" Voicing this isn't technically treachery, isn't anywhere near the spitting vitriol that Klaus is capable of, but coming from Luther's careful lips it still sounds borderline. It's questioning, and he almost never questions. "I feel like we could've gotten bigger rooms, now that we're older."

But of course: there was a reason that the children were penned up in the servants' wing, never to be seen or stumbled across underfoot unless they were at their lessons or training. It kept them safely tucked away out of sight, and it didn't pamper them. One and Three had the large bedrooms compared to everyone else, and even then, they weren't all that large.

"I definitely don't dislike clothes," Allison says enigmatically, with almost a note of confessed challenge in it. As if the thought she's having right at that moment isn't that the dress she's wearing she picked up simply because she liked how it looked, without even having somewhere to wear it yet, and simply told someone to give it to her.

"Wearing whatever you want, whenever you want?"

"Still hasn't gotten old."

She didn't miss a lot of things, but she definitely didn't miss the rote and repetition of the uniforms. Skirts and sweaters and blazer. Mary Janes. Always the same cut. Always the same color. Always the uniform row of little children in identical clothes. That image touches the brittle crack still there down her center, merges somehow with six of them fading to one.

One boy. Still perfectly suited. As the day he was last.
There's even the brief wonder if he had it with him.

Had anything non-uniform aside from this suit.

The pause before his next remark goes on a little too long, as Luther considers whether or not to touch that particular button. In the end, he settles for honesty — it's always been the easiest action with her, instinctive like breathing.

"I still don't really know what that's like," he admits. "Wearing whatever you want. We've relaxed on the dress code a little, since..."

Since all the others had left. A school wasn't a school when it only consisted of one pupil.

"Well, recently. I don't have to have the blazer or tie on all the time. But it's still all dress shirts and slacks and Oxfords. My growth spurt was a headache. Mom had to tailor so many clothes."

There's some self-consciousness twisting in his gut at that admission. And after a strangled second, as if he's trying to skip on ahead and not linger on precisely how sad that truth was, the boundaries of his surprisingly small life, he adds: "How far are we from your place?"

[ There had been their long night together and a fairytale evening which seemed like it would never end (or at least, if they closed their eyes and wished hard enough, maybe it wouldn't have to). Heartbeats pressed close in a bed too small for someone of his size and height.

A phone number scribbled in her familiar handwriting and then pressed into his palm, long fingers folding over the piece of paper. A kiss to the cheek goodbye as he heads back east.

Postcards and letters are fantastic (they've been piling up in his drawer back home), but they also take so long to cross the country in the mail — and so, one day, Luther makes sure Reginald's not home, and he heads to the hacked payphone downstairs, and he dials Allison's number. ]

[ It's the middle of the day, and she'd usually be anywhere else, but those plans got canceled, so she isn't. Instead, she's in sweatpants, bare feet up, foam insert between each of her toes, as she paints her last toe and the phone rings.

It's a bit of a grapple. Applicator pushed into the hand with the bottle, twisting, looking between the phone and where her feet end up, before her fingers finally catch the arm of the receiver on the table beside the couch. Dropping back down on the couch, a little out of breath. ]

Allison Hargreeves speaking.

[ As ever, as always, his heart turns over in his chest at the sound of her voice. He wasn't ready for that. He'd thought he was ready after seeing and hearing her on the big screen and the small screen for years now — but Allison always sounds slightly different when she's acting, some subtle shift of mannerism and demeanour and voice which means it isn't her up there. Not really. And the sound is always stripped-down and distant, run through post-production and sound effects.

But this is her, answering as herself, and so Luther temporarily forgets how to talk. ]

Um. Uh, hi, Allison? It's me.

[ Oh god! No, introduce yourself, you're supposed to introduce yourself on the phone! ]

It's Luther Hargreeves speaking?

[ Oh god no this is even worse, of course she knows your voice, you idiot. ]

[ She knows at the first um, and there's no way she could fully explain how. (The tone? His timbre? Awkward, then rush, nearly shouted pause, and further blurting of words?)

It's enough to stop her. Make her blink. This is impossible.
(Not impossible. The Academy has a billion phones across its floors.)

Except it's happening. Right. Now. ]

Luther?

[ Training excels over surprise.
Even when she hates it. Serious. ]

Is everything okay? Did something happen?

Oh no, no, everything's fine. I know we said this was just in case, and so we could reach other quicker, and in case there's an emergency or if I was going to be on the west coast again, or—

[ A nervous outpouring of words. He really should've stopped and written down some notes and cues and practiced beforehand, but he hadn't expected this to be as suddenly difficult as it is. Luther's capable of improvising across a dozen different interviews or press conferences, but hearing Allison's voice over this clunky handset just unravels him. ]

I was reading the newspaper, and I just wanted to say hi, and: congratulations on that Emmy nomination. For your show.

[ He lists them all: the reasons he has to be calling. Striking them down one by one, as clear as any other memorization he performed at the front of one of their classrooms. Feet slightly apart, hands behind his back, chin up. But not like that now. Or it's more that the rush of his words are nothing like the metered step of that boy, of any of a million memorized poems and speeches and rules.

Which doesn't make sense —

until that word; and she can't even stop the words from leaving her own.
Feeling more baffled even as he gives the reason. ]

You heard about that?

[ Maybe he'd be a little more relaxed if he was a little more comfortable, too. Sitting down, even. But he's standing in the middle of one of those long crooked hallways in the mansion, back straight and rigid next to that payphone, with half an ear listening for the front door in case the Monocle gets home again in the middle of this conversation. Ready to blurt out an apology and slam the receiver down and then scurry back to one of his rooms.

(He really needs to get a landline for his bedroom. Maybe he'll talk to Pogo about it.) ]

Yeah, it was in the papers. I read the entertainment section sometimes.

[ Translation: All the time, ever since her career started taking off and there was a chance of finding a glimpse of her in there. ]

[ "I'm your biggest fan, remember?"

Or whatever those words were exactly when he took them from the joke on one of his letters, wrapped them in the weight of a voice she somehow still knew maybe even better than she knew her own, and carved into her bones having to hear it out loud, too. A topic she still wasn't sure if it was more joke or not. But, then. There was this, too.

Luther calling her. To congratulate her. Which she can handle, right? ]

Oh. Uh — thanks. There's no definite knowing how it'll go until that night, but thank you.

How does it go? [ A beat, a curiosity; reaching out to learn more about her new life, without him, without them. ] The Emmy nights, I mean. The, um, party.

[ Allison looked up at the ceiling before finally looking back at her hands. She put the applicator back into the polish bottle and sealed it as she spoke. It's strange but a little nice.

Easier than talking about it with people not going. Well, people here, not going, who weren't similarly nominated. ]

A lot of really famous, and not so famous yet, people, all dressed to the nines, saying a lot of really nice things to each other. Tension is pretty high, as people are waiting to see what work paid off the best from the last year and where it might direct where things are going in the next few by that, too.

[ Luther's settled his weight against the wall now: leaning against it with his long legs stretched out until the toes of his boots touch the opposite wall. Looking at least a little less like he's standing at attention and ready for inspection. ]

Do you think the worst thing is trying to keep a straight face during the actual award announcements? When the cameras are on you and you have to try to look gracious and happy for the other people winning. The red carpet looks so much easier by comparison.

[ Maybe he says that because he's so, so terrible at keeping his poker face, though. He wouldn't last a minute under that white-hot scrutiny, the cameras picking through every micro-expression and waiting for that flicker of disappointment, the sour loss. ]

Second worst.

[ Allison tossed the nail polish tube into a basket of them on the living room table, looking at her toes. A strange feeling of whatever the reverse of déjà vu was. ]

The worst is still losing.

Being graceful about it is next.

Allison doesn't consider it likely. Their father clearing out a whole room when he never considered letting them upgrade to any of the --

She nearly laughs, smiling amused but fast, here and gone, when Luther's words cut off her divisive, annoying thoughts at their father and the same subject. That was becoming more and more frequent during these last years. The moments they just slid into sync. They connected the same dots and wanted to hit upon the same question, even if from two very different opinions are their father.

Allison tosses her response shamelessly. "Because he hates us?"
The only reason she even had her room was that she took it.

It's not hard to picture. If anything, it's this tux that keeps throwing her. Luther looks like a normal person in it, and normal is not something Number One is. He chose not to be. He decided to stay Number One. Spaceboy. To run away from any confessions about wanting to get out, have a real life, be real people.

It's easy to picture him still there. Trapped still in amber.
A grown man still haunts that house in his child self's clothes.

Allison has thought that so many times. Angry. Hurt. Bitter. But this time, it's sad. She was glancing at him as he kept talking, entirely out of any context but that god-awful trap of a house. Other people would buy bigger clothes. Making her skip his question altogether, with a completely different one of her own, underwritten by a sudden fierce want to shake the goddamn bars of that cage until they break even if it isn't her place anymore.

"You know this city never sleeps, right?"

"I could find you somewhere to take you shopping right now."

It's more threat and promise than offer, but she can't stop it rolling out.

[ Allison doesn't know how she finds the phonebooth. How long it took. Exactly where it is. She doesn't. Can't. Everything was — and then — it wasn't. How is. How did she. How will. She didn't keep the cab. She wasn't going to have to — she could have — Patrick would've — he was wasn't — she needed another — she had to get —

But when the operator signs on

that isn't the number Allison barely manages to gasp out needing. ]

[ A dark and stormy night in Los Angeles, in the middle of the night and that dead period before dawn, is even later in their eastern city. Klaus is haunting the downstairs bar, Five is dead to the world in the bunk bed (the man really, truly needed a rest), and Luther, too, is still passed out cold when that landline suddenly rings in their hotel room.

Alarms have always gotten him up and out of bed immediately, the klaxons at the Academy propelling him to his feet and already reaching for the neatly-folded uniform on the chair, knowing the children would be timed on how quickly they could get up and get moving. But this particular shrill sound startles him — he's not used to the phone yet, no one ever calls him — and then he's automatically reaching out for the threatening noise to stop it, almost accidentally smashing the phone for a second, before he lifts it off its cradle in the darkness and presses it to his ear, his voice a low croak. ]

Hello?

for numberthree.

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los angeles. a phonecall.

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Something is very wrong; 3.02 Fix-It

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